Last month, Meta (META) , which owns popular social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, sent a stern warning to employees that it was planning to cut roughly 3,600 jobs. That number amounts to about 5% of the company’s workforce.
In the internal memo sent to employees, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the job cuts would be based on performance, and the company will be hiring new employees this year to replace those who are laid off.
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“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster,” said Zuckerberg in the memo. “We typically manage out people who aren’t meeting expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle.”
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Zuckerberg said the layoffs come during a time when Meta is heavily focusing on developing artificial intelligence, its smart glasses and “the future of social media.”
“This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams,” said Zuckerberg.
Laid-off Meta employees flag major issue
The first round of Meta’s job cuts kicked off on Feb. 10, and some employees who were let go are claiming that they were “blindsided” by being laid off since they had recently received positive performance reviews, according to a new report from Business Insider.
The fired Meta employees who spoke to Insider said that they received “At or Above Expectations” ratings in their 2024 mid-year reviews. These ratings are allegedly the middle tier in Meta’s three-level performance system.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
The former employees claim that when they received notification that their jobs were being cut, they were shocked to find out that their ratings had fallen to “Meets Most,” which is a low tier in Meta’s performance rating system that means an employee met most, but not all, expectations.
“When I received the email I was surprised by it mostly because I have a very solid performance history and no indicators of the last six months of performance problems,” said one former employee in an interview with Insider.
Another former Meta employee told Insider that they were laid off yesterday even after their manager assured them that they would be safe from the job cuts.
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“We were told by leadership that if we would be impacted by this, then we would already be expecting it, based on conversations our managers should have been having with us in our weekly one-on-ones,” said the former Meta employee. “But I was completely blindsided by this. My manager had been telling me that I have been doing great and did not provide any areas to be worked on. My manager even said that I would be fine and not impacted.”
The move from Meta comes after an internal memo last month gave its managers the green light to lay off higher-performing employees if they weren’t able to meet reduction targets solely by cutting low-performing employees, according to Insider.
In a statement to TheStreet, a Meta spokesperson said that performance ratings employees received were not downgraded. They also claimed that just because an employee previously met expectations, it doesn’t mean that they have continued to meet the bar.
Meta’s blunt layoff announcement differs from recent trend
Meta is one of the many companies in the tech industry that have kicked off 2025 with layoffs. Microsoft, Workday, Amazon and Intel are some of the many companies that have already announced layoffs this year.
So far in 2025, 46 tech companies have announced job cuts, resulting in 11,664 employees being laid off, according to recent data from Layoffs.fyi.
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Meta’s layoff announcement was particularly surprising since it claimed its job cuts would only target underperforming employees. This framing for layoffs diverts from a recent trend in corporate America where companies have often blamed “cutting costs” as the reason for job cuts.
According to a survey from Resume Builder last year, 80% of business leaders said that they used layoffs to terminate employees they wanted to fire. Half of the business leaders admitted that 75% or more of the layoffs at the company in the past year weren’t necessary for cutting costs.
Also, about 62% of business leaders said that their company disguised performance-based terminations as layoffs in an effort to maintain company morale, while 59% said they did so in order to avoid wrongful termination claims. Only 39% said they disguised the terminations in order to avoid hurting the employee’s feelings.
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